Juicy Fruit!

As a kid I had a hell of sweet tooth. Halloween had nothing on me as far candy consumption was concerned. With a mom who regularly chugged Coca Cola around and an old man who maintained a high volume bubble gum dish in his barber shop I was assured that sweets would have no trouble breaching the walls of my home.

Down the block from where I lived was a drive-thru dairy that stocked an incredible array of treats for the kids from the Catholic school to hit up on the way home: wax bottles filled with bright colored sticky liquids of unknown origins, 2^nd tier off quality chocolate bars that sat too long in the sun, PEZ dispensers with their strange hard chalky candies, hard candy necklaces that discolored your neck, citrus flavored suckers on white paper loops in endless cellophane rolls like machine gun ammo and packs of queer bubblegum cards with equally strange (and tasteless) cardboard like bubble gum. Somehow I could never get a decent bubble out of that gum. The texture was woody, the flavor almost medicinal and the amount of work it took just to get it soft was almost too much work for the dingy amount of pleasure it produced.

I loved gum probably more than any other kind of confection that came my way. You might think, gum, what the hell, there’s a million kinds of candy out there to love. Ok, sure, I wasn’t opposed to a Hershey bar, cinnamon toothpicks or those gaudy oversized suckers from an amusement parks. But gum was ubiquitous, it was everywhere and best of all, carried regularly in my mom’s purse. Those were the days when you were assured of an after lunch stick of gum when you were out and about. 

Gum ruled my candy coated world because it was sanctioned and indulged in by the powers that were.There were so many kinds of gum out there that rocked our kid worlds back in the 60’s. I remember the weird pleasures of Black Jack, Clove, Beemans. Dentyne and Chicklets but it was the big guns, Wrigley’s Doublemint, Spearmint and, best of all, Juicy Fruit, that carried the day on a regular basis. Of all the flavors out there only Juicy Fruit was guaranteed to satisfy. I know that mint gums were preferable to adults to mask those after-meal scents, too much booze or to settle down a rumbly tummy. But to a kid that wild tropical minded taste was just the thing that could, in its soft squishy kid of way, make a dessert jones disappear or quiet down the mind before a movie at the West Coast picture palace. If I couldn’t get Good and Plenty, Abbazabba or chocolate Dots I knew that I could always coax a stick of Juicy Fruit out of my mom’s pocket book.

Years pass and boys grow up. In recent years I have taken on dark chocolate, high in cacao, to satisfy my candy urges. I left behind boxes of malted milk balls and instead, I seek out See’s marzipan by the half pound to satisfy my candy urges. I put aside the joys of hard butterscotch candies by the bagful and indulge, instead, in Almond Roca from the can. And gum, well, I have a partner who knows how to blow a mighty fine bubble from stick gum, even without the benefit of Bazooka Joe’s favorite brand around to make bubbles with. After all these years I don’t know if Juicy Fruit would even satisfy a candy jones anymore.

So it makes me wonder, why I am in such a big damn hurry to seek out Juicy Fruit, the strain? I know that just doing a dry hit will be a trip back to child hood, but will that trip also come with all the repercussions of that "just don’t do it" claptrap that came along with the marijuana messages of my youth? What kind of sick and demented grower would market a strain that tastes like a slice of life that was decidedly not friendly to dope? A man just has to find out.

What draws me to this strain is that it is close as I can get to the landrace genetics that I love. How can you go wrong with a melange of Thai and Afghan flowers tumbling around in your head? My reads on Leafly give me the impression that it is a happy kind of dope, a real wake and bake kind of strain, something that is guaranteed to slap a big old happy smile on your face no matter when or where you use it.

When I think of that I think, okay, that’s what would happen when my mom would dig out a pack of gum from her bag. No matter how bad the day was a stick of Juicy Fruit gum would turn things around. Sounds like whoever put together the ying and the yang of those plants knew what they were doing. Sounds like I just might have to make my way down to the convenience store and pick up a pack of Juicy Fruit until I can find a dispensary that can take care of that old slice of life jones.

I may get lucky sooner than I think. And while I don’t necessarily trust those on-line menus I read that Peaceful Choice out in Boulder just might make my day. My birthday is around the corner. Who needs cake when there is good stick of gum is to be had?

Salud!